Benzinga | May 20, 2021 07:07PM EDT

Looking into Flowers Foods's Return on Capital Employed

After pulling data from Benzinga Pro it seems like during Q1, Flowers Foods (NYSE:FLO) earned $115.11 million, a 48.12% increase from the preceding quarter. Flowers Foods also posted a total of $1.30 billion in sales, a 27.27% increase since Q4. Flowers Foods earned $77.71 million, and sales totaled $1.02 billion in Q4.

What Is Return On Capital Employed?

Return on Capital Employed is a measure of yearly pre-tax profit relative to capital employed by a business. Changes in earnings and sales indicate shifts in a company's ROCE. A higher ROCE is generally representative of successful growth of a company and is a sign of higher earnings per share in the future. A low or negative ROCE suggests the opposite. In Q1, Flowers Foods posted an ROCE of 0.08%.

Keep in mind, while ROCE is a good measure of a company's recent performance, it is not a highly reliable predictor of a company's earnings or sales in the near future.

ROCE is an important metric for the comparison of similar companies. A relatively high ROCE shows Flowers Foods is potentially operating at a higher level of efficiency than other companies in its industry. If the company is generating high profits with its current level of capital, some of that money can be reinvested in more capital which will generally lead to higher returns and earnings per share growth.

For Flowers Foods, the return on capital employed ratio shows the number of assets can actually help the company achieve higher returns, an important note investors will take into account when gauging the payoff from long-term financing strategies.

Upcoming Earnings Estimate

Flowers Foods reported Q1 earnings per share at $0.41/share, which beat analyst predictions of $0.39/share.